Today we publish the salaries paid to the three employees of the union who are candidates for the position of General Secretary.

Although they are only Assistant General Secretaries, their packages rival those of the bosses of other major unions, e.g. the GMB General Sec's salary is only £87,000, NUT boss gets £94,374, Unison GS's basic is £97,327.

Unite has 9 Assistant General Secretaries!

Source - Unite TGWU and Amicus sections

Should we be unfortunate enough to elect any one of them General Secretary in November they will likely be receiving a package costing in excess of current General Secretary Simpson's £196,497

What is notable is the poor showing by McCluskey considering that the T&G side of the union (his side) have 3,000 out of the total 5,000 branches. So the machine's man could only get 1/4 of his own branches to support him for General Secretary. The same does apply to Bayliss although with Bayliss's history in Amicus this is not at all

There has been a lot of misinformation about how Len McCluskey was selected as the candidate of the 'United Left' group for General Secretary of Unite. The misinformation has been spread particularly thickly on United Left's secretive, small and paranoid email list.

So we publish below the true account by someone who was actually there, Dr Judy Atkinson. This was originally published in the respected Labour Left Briefing magazine:

UNITED LEFT ELECTS RIGHT WINGER AS CANDIDATE FOR GENERAL SECRETARY ELECTIONS IN 2010

Judy Atkinson reports

On 5th September, in a hustings marred by exclusions, bullying and walk outs, United Left supporters met in Manchester to decide who will be their candidate for Unite general secretary in 2010.

Three candidates who had put their names forward were Jerry Hicks, victimised convenor at Bristol Rolls Royce, who in March came closer than anyone else to unseating Derek Simpson when he polled 40,000 votes to Simpson’s 60,000 in the election for joint general secretary; Len McLuskey, Unite assistant general secretary and Tony Woodley’s favoured successor; and Rob Williams, convenor at the Linamar factory in Swansea, victimised and subsequently reinstated after a successful strike in May.

At the start of the meeting United Left national chair Martin Mayer decided to exclude about 20 people on various spurious grounds that they had arrived late or were not

The editor of this site David Beaumont has been secretly banned from the 'United Left' email group. We say secretly because even he wasn't told let alone the other members and no reasons were given. In addition six of his posts have been airbrushed from the group's archives.

The United Left group is supposedly an amalgamation of the TGWU left and the Amicus left, of which David has been a member for over 15 years. In reality though the Amicus Left split and the TGWU Left was always a tiny but powerful General Secretary's supporters club. The group purports to be the Left in the union but its list currently has only 193 members. Many of these are paid union officials (some even using their official '@unitetheunion.com' email address) and some members maintain duplicate addresses.

To put the 193 figure in context, dearunite.com's mailout list has just under 3,000 email addresses and the Union has 1.2 to 1.7 million members. So you can see there is something wrong with the lay democracy of the union when the paranoid controllers, many of them paid, of a list of 193 people claim to represent the entire

Charlie Whelan was appointed 'Political Director' of Unite out of the blue by General Secretary Simpson, at a large undisclosed salary. Now just as suddenly and undemocratically he has gone. His only achievement we have noticed is his scheme to ensure that all Unite prospective MPs have to be approved onto a list. Once on, if not selected for a seat, they cannot stand against the chosen one. (see page 11). Nothing about following Unite policy once in power then, more about face fitting.

One of his last, expensive, contributions to the Unite Executive meetings was

In our last post ('Hicks in the Sun') we showed how Murdoch's paper The Sun covered Unite General Secretary candidate Jerry Hicks. Here by contrast is how his other paper treats candidate Les Bayliss. Spot the difference and judge for yourself who is planning to screw Unite members:

Strikers Blow

Union chief slams walk-outs over cuts

WARNING: Les Bayliss

By David Wooding, Chief Political Editor, 12/09/2010

A UNION chief last night urged militants to BACK OFF from a threatened wave of "suicide" strikes over public spending cuts.

Monday, 6 September 2010Sun City - The financial page you can trust edited by Steve HawkesAN extremist hoping to run the Unite union has vowed to ground BRITISH AIRWAYS by taking ALL staff on strike.And he vowed to "bring matters to a head" if voted in this December - by extending the cabin crew dispute to all members, such as baggage handlers. He said: "Seventy members have been suspended by BA, 13 have been sacked.

"This is no longer just about changing cabin crew terms and conditions. It's about busting a union."

He continued: "It needs to be brought to a head, to a conclusion.

"With the members' backing I would extend balloting beyond the cabin crew."

Mr Hicks claimed BA needs to realise that "browbeating" workers into submission may hand them victory - but would de-motivate staff. He is one of four contenders to replace joint heads Derek Simpson and Tony...

You may have noticed there is an election for General Secretary of Unite. If you ever had any doubt that Assistant General Secretary Len McCluskey is the chosen candidate of the well oiled union machine then look no further than his own campaign website's source code*:

All the previous sites were coded in raw HTML which was great for flexibility but a chore to update. This new site is much simpler. To see the all the old articles click on 'Old Site' in the left column. The search box at top works on the old site if you then choose 'linked from here'. Legal notice: This is not the official site of the union 'Unite'.